Topic: Authentification problem

[Luc Verstraeten]

I don't have access to the server-manager anymore. The httpd-admin error log states:

[error] access to /etc/e-smith/web/panels/manager/html failed for 127.0.0.1, reason: AuthExtern pwauth [/usr/lib/apache/pwauth]: Failed (255) for user admin

The password and username are correct. Does anybody have any ideas?

[Rémi Jouve]

127.0.0.1 is a local host ip adress
perhaps you don't call the right adress for access to the administrator


(if you speak french perhaps i can help you more because my english is poor)

[Robert]

What release do you use? Have you updated any RPMS besides those included in the official Mitel updates? Does this problem persist across reboots or restarts of httpd-e-smith/httpd-admin?

[Luc Verstraeten]

I use release 5.5 with all the updates applied.

It persists after a reboot/restart of the services.

What I did find out is that in the /var/log/messages there is a 'groups exceeded' message in it.
I thought the groups bug was solved in 5.0...

My problem is that the suggested fixes in earlier posts (v4.12) don't seem to work.

[Robert]

Do you have any idea what could have triggered this? Do you remember what you did before you lost access to the server-manager? It looks like you already searched /var/log/messages. Did you find anything unusual from when the pwauth error first occurred?
About the groups exceeded bug: have you checked if admin is still part of the www group?
Error 255 does not appear to be documented in the pwauth docs.

[Luc Verstraeten]

We were adding groups.

In var/log/messages it states:

Jan 23 11:04:38 esmith-mail e-smith[17551]: usermod: too many groups specified (max 32).
Jan 23 11:04:38 esmith-mail e-smith[17551]: S15group-create-unix=action|Event|group-create|Action|S15group-create-unix|Start|

I removed the last group but still no success.

My groups (en groups-)-files have:

admin:www:x:102:
www:x:101:

Tnx for the help btw!

[Robert]

Then it would seem that admin is not part of the www group. Try adding it manually and restarting httpd-admin as per the instructions in http://www.e-smith.org/bugs/index.php3?op=showBug&bugID=61.

[Luc Verstraeten]

I get :

Starting httpd-admin: httpd-admin: bad group name admin       [ FAILED ]


??

[Robert]

Do you have a group 'admin' with 'www' as its member?

[Luc Verstraeten]

I have in groups and groups-

www:x:101:admin
admin:www:x:102:

Is this correct?

[Robert]

I have:

admin:x:101:www
www:x:102:admin

Correct entries take the form:
groupname:password(or 'x' for shadow password):gid:members

[Luc Verstraeten]

This did the trick!
Tnx a lot!

Do you have any idea why this suddenly changed? Could it be the groups bug?

[Robert]

The groups bug is a likely candidate: the symptoms and solution would seem to suggest that that was the problem.
I suggest that you send a detailed bug report to Mitel. It would help if you could replicate the error on SME 5.6. I don't think Mitel will allocate a lot of resources to solving bugs in 5.5.